1999-05-10 04:00:00 PDT San Francisco -- Year after year, San Francisco's parks have been forced to delay repairs to leaking roofs and antiquated play equipment or put off building new athletic fields because the city just doesn't have enough money.

Tom Fox, who proudly wears the badge of environmental hustler, thinks he can help fix the problem. If his past is any indication, Mayor Willie Brown's hired gun for open space will be looking to public-private partnerships or even commercial development to transform the city's parks from cash-losers to self- sustaining enterprises.

Fox, 52, arrived last month to run Brown's election-year effort to spruce up San Francisco's parks and recreation centers. Although he is officially here as a privately paid consultant to help out acting parks chief Joel Robinson, many of the parks' big-money donors make no secret of their hope that he will get the top job himself.

Park advocates, and the mayor himself, had hoped the voters would go for a huge bond measure this year to make park improvements. But polls show there is not much support for the idea, leaving San Francisco to grapple with an old problem -- how to protect and expand open space without draining other programs or raising taxes.

It is a familiar question to Fox from his days in New York, where the former member of the Green Guerrillas environmental group now runs a water-taxi service and commands as much as $300 an hour as a development and environmental consultant.

In New York, Fox is best known for his work on a proposed park that would be built along five miles of the lower Hudson River shoreline, now distinguished mainly by abandoned, rotting piers. While city leaders have long wanted to rebuild the waterfront, they have not wanted to spend a lot of public dollars on the project.

The financing plan that Fox pushed through as head of the Hudson River Park Conservancy, a development corporation set up by then-Governor Mario Cuomo and then-Mayor David Dinkins, was to lease parts of the industrial waterfront and vacant piers to commercial developers.

The development of "park-friendly" businesses such as restaurants, pubs, stores and skating rinks on several piers, Fox argued, would help pay for the park, which is estimated to cost from $350 million to $500 million.

Staunch environmentalists denounced the plan, saying that commercializing any part of the river and its shore would ruin the city's green space, endanger wildlife and create traffic and parking chaos for nearby residents.

"The project that Fox tried to get includes 490 acres of critical habitat in the lower Hudson River," said opponent Marcy Benstock, who once worked with Fox to fight for more open space. "It's the equivalent of paving over 490 acres of the San Francisco Bay . . . in a piecemeal fashion."

Fox is no longer with the conservancy, now named the Hudson River Park Trust. But his plan is still alive. He insists that development would be limited to existing piers and that only developments that benefit the park would be allowed.

Construction of the park has not yet begun. But already, developers have built a massive complex of skating rinks, basketball courts, a driving range and more on a string of wharves known collectively as Chelsea Piers.

Critics say Chelsea Piers is losing money, which they see as an indication that commercial ventures are not the solution to protect open space. They also fear that the Hudson River Park Trust, granted special powers to oversee the project, will eventually allow even more developers to build along the waterfront.

"Given the powers and financial incentives that the trust has to get more and more money to build things over the river, we don't see a prayer that this critical Atlantic Coast habitat will be left intact," Benstock said.

Fox believes the criticism about the project comes from "truly marginalized people" who don't represent the majority.

The Hudson River Park Alliance, a coalition of environmental, civic and community groups, has hailed the project as a financially sensible way to preserve prime city property as parkland.

"He's a visionary with feet on the ground," said Lutz, program manager of the 500-member nonprofit group, to which Fox belongs. "Commerce can provide funding in an era where governments are refusing to fund parks."

In San Francisco, Fox is struggling with the same funding issue as he leads the mayor's "park renaissance crusade." He insists he has made no decisions about how major capital improvements could be paid for.

"I'm not here to raise money (for parks)," Fox said. "I'm here to leverage additional resources for the system. That could come from any number of sources."

Many of Fox's toughest critics in New York believe it will not be long before he suggests turning some of San Francisco's parks into the latest spots for pubs, coffee shops and bowling alleys -- things that help make up the Hudson River Park project.

"He calls himself an environmentalist," said Stuart Waldman of the Federation to Preserve the Greenwich Village Waterfront. "But my feeling is that . . . he's not a park expert and he's up to his neck with his developers.

"Believe me, if he becomes park chief, you're going to see a lot of parks financed with public-private partnerships, which I call corporate takeovers."

Mayoral spokeswoman Kandace Bender said any recommendation Fox makes will go before a public process. "The goal we all have is to protect our open space," she said.

Fox does not rule out the idea of some "park-friendly" commercial development in public parks.

"If they do not take away from the parks' mission, they should be explored," Fox said. "But I'm still in the sponge stage of the process."

To "soak up" suggestions, Fox is spending two weeks a month in San Francisco. He will spend the rest of his time in New York, heading the Fox consulting group and the New York Water Taxi.

Many park advocates in San Francisco agree with Fox that the criticism in New York comes mostly from a fringe group. They remain optimistic about him.

"I've known Tom a long time, but it's really in his previous capacity that I knew him," said park advocate Isabel Wade, referring to his earlier fights to expand community gardens and open space in New York. "He was an absolute fireball. He saw a need. He pulled a lot of disparate people together and became quite an effective advocate for open space."

But one San Francisco park advocate raised concerns, saying she had never heard about his push for commercializing parts of the Hudson River waterfront.

"Our parent group supported (a proposed) cafe at Dolores Park (because) it seemed like a good thing, and it wasn't a corporate takeover," said Marybeth Wallace of Coleman Advocates for Children and Youth.

But "if McDonald's were to come into Golden Gate Park, we might look at it differently."